Testing and analysing uncrewed survey methods
SHOM – the French national hydrographic service – is planning to replace most of its aging seagoing assets in the near future and, in this context, a four-week sea trial took place in Brest, on th...
Exploring new horizons for ocean observation
As the informed readership of Hydro International knows, the oceans sustain the planet. And, while there are many drivers of the changes to the Earth’s climate that now pose an existential threat to...
Who is going to map the high seas?
To achieve the aggressive goals of Seabed 2030, uncrewed survey systems must be used to augment more traditional ocean mapping efforts, particularly on the high seas. In addition to providing a much-n...
Using machine learning to derive benthic habitat maps
The South African Council for Geoscience recently launched an initiative to optimize marine geophysical data collection in South African waters. The main aim of the initiative is to produce marine off...
The challenges of surveying the Faroe Islands
Crewless aerial mapping was recently chosen when surveying the Faroe Islands. For the small team, labour savings provided one advantage of a UAV-based approach. Another benefit was that clear skies ar...
Data quality factors for marine UXO surveys
The detection of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in the sea is a demanding task. UXO survey data is acquired using a set of different sensors in different configurations and can span large areas. To make su...
Hydrospatial Technology: Collaboration Expanding Globally to Address Escalating Needs
Hydrospatial could be described as that portion of geospatial knowledge infrastructure that addresses the hydrosphere, and hydrospatial technologies support navigation, economic development, stability...
Introducing a portable ASV for extremely shallow waters
SWAMP (Shallow Water Autonomous Multipurpose Platform) is a new autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) whose design and development form the foundation for an innovative class of highly modular and reconfig...
Sentinel-2 satellite-derived bathymetry in optically complex waters
Coastal areas are highly dynamic environments that are subject to diverse pressures, both anthropogenic (e.g. urban development, fishing, habitat modification) and natural (e.g. storms, erosion, flood...
Robotics and automation advance the offshore wind industry
During the life cycle of offshore wind farms (OWFs), operators must maximize the uptime of wind turbines to generate as much energy as possible. As OWFs are constructed further from the coast, mainten...
Airborne Lidar bathymetry in close up
RIEGL tested the performance of its topobathymetric airborne laser scanning system in a transition zone context along the French Mediterranean coast. Initially planned as a UAV survey, tests were cond...
Cable inspections the uncrewed way
XOCEAN has completed 35 cable inspection surveys using a combination of uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) and uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) between the Scottish mainland and Western Isles. There was a...
Building a 3D world: common sources of elevation data
As the demand for elevation data continues to rise, it is important that users match the level of reliability, accuracy and resolution of the data to their specific application to arrive at an appropr...
Participatory geomatics network for coastal mapping and monitoring
This article presents a participative geomatics project with the goal of increasing southern Québec’s coastal communities’ ability to map and monitor changes in their coastal environment. Capacit...
